Category Archives: safety

CES 2015 has been certainly the year of connectivity. Gone are the days when the stars of the show were 60-inch, then 80-inch, then 105-inch flat panel TVs…Those are now well underway to the homes of many consumers.

This year, it seems like transportation has invaded the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) – all sort of smart cars and…..wait….gadgets for bicycles as well. In previous article I talked about the Car-to-Bicycle Communicating Helmet, and now we have a pedal that allows the bike it is part of to be connected. A French company Connected Cycle, has developed this pedal which notifies you any time the bike is moved and also provides you with the location of the bike.

The pedal has integrated GPS functionality that creates the tracking and prevents the bicycle from being stolen – a significant plus in a big city or part of a bike sharing program.

In addition, the pedal records the bike’s speed, route, incline, and calories burnt and of course those will be stored and accessed via a cloud service. So overall, useful and interesting.

Volvo, the automotive company most of us associate with safety has gone ahead of the class again! They have put in product car-to-bicycle communicating helmet for bicycle riders. This is not just a lab experiment and something that works on “a Tuesday morning if it is sunny, and you are peddling your bike really slowly…” but a real product instantiation — in a real SUV.

Volvo has implemented communications link that allows drivers to communicate directly with bicycle riders and avoid collisions on the road. The solution is a GPS tracking application where the helmet (worn by the bicyclist) establishes a two way link between the rider and the driver, calculates the position of both the SUV and bicycle and ultimately the driver is notified via the Volvo dash information system, while the cyclist gets notified via a helmet mounted light.

You can also take a look at another very interesting concept (already funded on Kickstarter.com) bike — a connected bike which counts your spent calories riding, provides navigation guidance (via integrated lights and your smart phone GPS system), uses integrated proximity sensors to detect approaching vehicles and notify via vibration of their approach. Here is a video by the developers: